Listen'Foster for adopt' must not be seen as a headlong rush into adoption
In her recent article "We need to value foster care, not fixate on adoption", Judith Rees raises some important issues about current policy and particularly those generated by Clause 1 of the Children and Families Bill.
Undoubtedly, there is widespread concern in the sector that more focus needs to be paid to all types of family placement and that adoption should not be seen as the gold standard.
Every placement children's services make must focus on the needs and welfare of the child and their development. If there is one overriding factor that brings that objective to life, it is the recognition that family life is core for every child.
Family life establishes the key features of belonging, commitment, love, security and identity. The absence of a meaningful and continuous family life is to impose such severe limitations on children that it must be the driver in finding a replacement family when this is not available within the child's own family.
The legal status of the "replacement" family is one factor, whether this is adoption, special guardianship, residence orders or foster care. But that is only one factor. From the child's point of view, it is their feelings for the people whom they come to experience as parents, other family members and the place they regard as home that counts.
Where it becomes necessary to establish a new family life for a child, then we must avoid any prolonged sense of the temporary. Children need to know and are indeed "programmed" to expect that the people who care for them will do so forever. If a child has adjusted to an expectation that the temporary is all that is available for them, then something serious has happened in their course of their development and it will take considerable effort to correct that – if it is possible at all.
Rees is right when she says professionals need to use the temporary to come to understand the child and their circumstances, and to make effective plans for establishing a new family life if that is what is required.
Unfortunately, the temporary often lasts for so long that the child may have come to believe this is the permanent. When, for instance, the average age at adoption has remained stubbornly close to age four, one can understand why. To disrupt a placement that has been the only family a child has known is a major assault on the child's belief and experience of what "forever" means.
The argument in concurrent planning is that it is the adults who are in the stronger position to manage the temporary and the uncertain as permanent placement planning evolves.
Addressing the rehabilitation plan and the permanence plan with the child placed with dually approved carers is the right thing to do from the child's perspective. The government's foster for adopt scheme is a further development of that idea where the evidence strongly suggests that a rehabilitation plan cannot be safely or effectively delivered.
Placing a child with dually approved carers under fostering regulations initially has significant advantages for the child. While delivering such a plan is available within the existing law, the governments want to strengthen the proposal with new primary legislation and that is framed in clause 1 of the Children and Families Bill.
In our view, that clause is flawed and will not deliver what is intended. Many others have expressed their objection to the clause as drafted. There are solutions to this and it is to be hoped that a more workable amendment will be laid very soon. Above all, however, it must be remembered that whatever disruption, anxiety and challenges we as adults might face in making foster for adoption work, young children experience the disruption and anxiety in a much more profound way.
Foster for adopt must not become associated with a headlong rush into adoption. But if it becomes a means for some children in the critical years of their development to experience "forever" meaning what is says, then this will be a significant achievement.
John Simmonds
16 May 2013
